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Queen bank

Our local large beekeeper has a nuc every spring that he puts a frame full of queen cages in that he buys. The workers care for all these queens until he needs them. What motivates the workers to feed and care for all these different queens? Why donít they cluster with one queen and ignore all the others? When I bought one of his queens, I got a look in the nuc and it looks like a normal hive with workers crawling around no with clustering.

Re: Queen bank

>Our local large beekeeper has a nuc every spring that he puts a frame full of queen cages in that he buys. The workers care for all these queens until he needs them. What motivates the workers to feed and care for all these different queens? Why don’t they cluster with one queen and ignore all the others? When I bought one of his queens, I got a look in the nuc and it looks like a normal hive with workers crawling around no with clustering.

What matters is that they do. If you make some bees queenless and give them a bunch of stranger queens in cages that were caged near the same time they will care for most all of them. If you add more queens later that were caged later, they usually kill the older queens and care for the new queens. It seems to be driven by the pheromones given off by the queens. The new ones were laying more recently and make more pheromones.

Re: Queen bank

>so I've got the same plan, is 24 hours the best time to leave the nuc queenless before adding 4 queen cages?

I go for overnight, which sometimes ends up 12 hours and sometimes ends up 24 hours. There seems to be something about overnight that the bees have time to sort things out at night and are too busy to do so in the daytime. After overnight they seem to be about the maximum acceptance of a new queen.

Re: Queen bank

You can supplement with brood. Oddly enough, they will raise a queen usually and, contrary to my expectations, so far they have not killed my other queens when they have done that. I usually cage her or put her in another small nuc and let them raise another...

Re: Queen bank

I can't say it's optimum, but I have experimented partly because of my bafflement at queens that came in packages that didn't lay for two weeks and I assumed it has to do with being banked. Yet even when I banked them for four or five months they queens would start laying in a day or two when introduced to a colony and they did fine. I think the issue is how SOON you bank them, not how long. They do not do well when you bank them as soon as they have laid an egg or two. They do much better if you let them lay for two or three weeks.

Re: Queen bank

I'm familiar with how to bank queens and have done so many times, usually 10-15 using a queenless 5 frame nuc. My question is this: How many queens can I bank in a 10 frame queenless hive. Of course I'll be adding frames of emerging brood every so often to replenish the nurse bees. I've got 40+ queens that I need to bank for an extended period. Please share your experience...thanks.